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Startup Aims To Feed The Ravenous Health App Industry

It’s a well known fact that people on diets tend to be pretty hungry. What’s less commonly admitted is that the industry set up to help them stick to their attrition regime is pretty hungry too.

The weight-loss market alone was worth $60.5 billion in the US during 2013, which sounds like a massive number but actually represents a 1.8% drop from 2012. Everything from a slow down in diet drink sales to a sluggish economy has been blamed for this decline, but it could just be a taste of things to come as technology starts to replace the starving stalwarts.

Perhaps the diet sector may soon be looking very emaciated indeed, due to the tasty-looking emerging market in health, wellness and nutrition apps. Research2Guidance estimated that 24million people will be using diabetes apps by 2018. By 2017, it has been suggested that at least 30% of American consumers will “regularly wear a device to track sleep, food, exercise, heart rate, blood pressure and even glucose”. Samsung has even made health apps a key part of its future strategy, preempting Apple'sApple's widely predicted move into the same sector.

One of the companies hoping to join in this feeding frenzy is Klappo, a London-based startup which describes itself as a “semantic platform for ingredients”. I went to visit this fledgling firm at its Shoreditch headquarters to get a sense of what sort of dish it intends to serve this growing industry.

“Food is our focus,” explains the firm’s Italian founder and CEO Massimiliano Del Vita. “We want to feed proper data to all the companies who want to innovate and give them access to a huge knowledge base about recipes, products and foods so they can build the best apps possible.”

Although its product will not be directly used by consumers, Klappo hopes its API will become a de facto standard for the food and health app sector. Basically, Klappo offers firms access to a huge database of food, which can then be cross-referenced against various dietary requirements.

It has collected 130,000 barcodes from various food products already on the shelves, as well as 500,000 recipes and details of 60,0000 food stuffs. Using semantic techniques, it is able to show the exact ingredients in each ingredient recipe or dish, as well as the process behind it. Klappo is in the process of building this unprecedented repository of food data through scraping and crowdsourcing, which it will then allow health app designers to use in products aimed at people with specific dietary requirements.

“Take diabetes suffers for instance,” Del Vita continued. “It is a huge problem. People suffering from this disease simply don’t know what food to buy. They keep on making choices which affect their health. We want to allow developers to give them suggestions, pointing them in the direction of a different dish or product with a similar taste or feel, but which is better for them.”

For anyone looking to develop a lucrative health app, the uses of this semantic database are obvious. If, say, you wanted to design a new app for people sticking to the latest ridiculous diet craze, Klappo could help you do it. Perhaps you want to allow people to scan labels in supermarkets or quickly parse the ingredients of a restaurant dish to make sure it fits with the tenets of the Paleo Diet, which encourages its advocates to eat the diet of a caveman. Klappo will allow you to do this. It is smart enough to work out processes and ingredients are generally used in dish, based on the recipes scraped from the internet, so diabetics, religious people or Paleo-afficionados can make sure they don’t snack on any forbidden fruit.

“Today it’s Paleo, but tomorrow it’s the Renaissance or Roman diet,” Del Vita added. “These are just sets of rules. Normally, companies, organizations and supermarkets would have to identify permissible foods for these diets manually. With Klappo, they can have access to the information right away.”

Del Vita is confident Klappo’s tech can help him get a piece of pie in the health tech market. “The mobile health app sector is going to explode,” he predicted. “Look at the rumors around the iWatch, which is supposed to have sensors relating to measuring activity and tracking a person’s blood pressure. They will shift hundreds of millions of units and these devices will needs apps. There are already 60,000 apps devoted to health, wellness and food. This sector is going to be big time.”

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